Lauri Giesen The early battles in the debit-network war triggered by the Durbin Amendment took a big toll on Visa’s Interlink brand, but now Visa has converted an obscure program into a powerful weapon. How are the EFT networks responding? Before April 2012, making a decision about which network over …

Mobile dominates this year’s Guide, as you’d expect, but so does the urge toward faster payments. Neither trend is going away any time soon. The obvious theme running through alternative payments nowadays is the predominance of mobile. Processors, solutions vendors, and startups alike are scrambling to make it possible to …

  With a major expansion of its arrangement with PayPal Inc. due later this year, Discover Financial Services is now “the alternative network for alternative payments in the United States,” Discover chief executive David W. Nelms told an audience of merchant acquirers on Wednesday. Hinting that more deals similar to …

  Discover Financial Services on Tuesday named six prominent merchant acquirers among 50 committed to helping the network bring acceptance of leading online payment system PayPal to more than 2 million physical merchant locations by year’s end. But a notable missing link is No. 1 merchant processor First Data Corp., …

  Leading payment processor First Data Corp. reached outside the company over the weekend to tap Frank Bisignano, a veteran operations executive with experience at some of the nation’s largest banks, as its new chief executive officer. Bisignano, most recently co-chief operating officer at JPMorgan Chase & Co., replaces Jonathan …

  One full year after complete implementation of the controversial Durbin Amendment’s debit card regulations, the impact on both merchants and consumers—the law’s putative beneficiaries—remains mixed, according to a study released by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. While Durbin drastically reduced interchange for the country’s largest banks while …

  n In the case of some merchants, a high rate of PIN acceptance is already controlling fraud, the merchants said. “Our actual fraud rate is so small it’s hardly worth mentioning,” said Gavin Waugh, vice president and assistant treasurer at Wendy’s International Inc. “[EMV] doesn’t move the needle that …

  The provisions of the Durbin Amendment to the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act are starting to hurt smaller issuers’ debit card income even though these financial institutions are explicitly exempted from the law’s cap on interchange rates, according to a debit expert. “This phenomenon is happening as we speak,” said Tony …

  Interchange rates on ATM transactions are falling and may not have hit bottom yet, so independent distributors of ATMs need to look for additional sources of revenue. That is the conclusion of a recently released white paper entitled, “The Future of Interchange in the United States,” sponsored by the …

  The retailer-backed Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX) mobile-payments system on Wednesday took another step toward its launch with the announcement that Netherlands-based Gemalto N.V. would provide the technology for its mobile wallet. Gemalto, which employs 224 workers at its U.S. headquarters in Austin, Texas, is best known for producing SIM …